14-Ontologically streamlined data for building design and operation support

Abstract

Evidence-based methods for building design and operation support require multiple streams of data. The heterogeneous nature of this data and the multiplicity of deployed software formats represent major obstacles toward the efficient use of such data in the building delivery and management processes, including building performance specification and assessment. To address the related challenges, versatile data ontologies are needed. To this end, a recently introduced building performance data ontology can identify, categorize, and capture the complexities of building related performance data and its attributes. The related data ontologization approach involves i) preprocessing, ii) categorical identification, and iii) supplementation of the relevant attributes, and iv) encoding in a proper file format. This chapter describes such an ontologization process as applied to large real-world building-related datasets. Specifically, building-related data is first processed in terms of fidelity and quality to be subsequently ontologized and delivered to a number of building performance assessment applications.